Press
reports on the recent New Jersey voting discrepancies have been a bit
vague about the exact nature of the evidence that showed up on election
day. What has the county clerks, and many citizens, so concerned? Today
I want to show you some of the evidence.

The evidence is a “summary tape” printed by a Sequoia AVC Advantage
voting machine in Hillside, New Jersey when the polls closed at the end
of the presidential primary election. The tape is timestamped 8:02 PM,
February 5, 2008.

The summary tape is printed by poll workers as part of the ordinary
procedure for closing the polls. It is signed by several poll workers
and sent to the county clerk along with other records of the election.

Above you can see the vote totals on this machine for each
candidate. On the Democratic side, the tally is Obama 182, Clinton 179.
On the Republican side it’s Giuliani 1, Romney 13, McCain 40, Paul 3,
Huckabee 4.

Above is the “Option Switch Totals” section, which shows the number
of times each party’s ballot was activated: 362 Democratic and 60
Republican.

This doesn’t add up. The machine says the Republican ballot was
activated 60 times; but it shows a total of 61 votes cast for
Republican candidates. It says the Democratic ballot was activated 362
times; but it shows a total of 361 votes for Democratic candidates.
(New Jersey has a closed primary, so voters can cast ballots only in
their own registered party.)

What’s alarming here is not the size of the discrepancy but its
nature. This is a single voting machine, disagreeing with itself about
how many Republicans voted on it. Imagine your pocket calculator
couldn’t make up its mind whether 1+13+40+3+4 was 60 or 61. You’d be
pretty alarmed, and you wouldn’t trust your calculator until you were
very sure it was fixed. Or you’d get a new calculator.

This wasn’t an isolated instance, either. In Union County alone, at
least eight other AVC Advantage machines exhibited similar problems, as
did dozens more machines in other counties.

Sequoia, the vendor, is trying to prevent any independent investigation of what happened.